


Bricks

by paintedrecs



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Appreciate Derek Hale, Deputy Derek Hale, Derek is a Christmas Baby, Derek is a Good Boyfriend, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Future Fic, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Minor Allison Argent/Scott McCall, Minor Violence, Stubborn Stiles, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 15:24:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4751345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paintedrecs/pseuds/paintedrecs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Mornin', love," Derek says, and Stiles freezes in his arms. They haven't exchanged official <em>I love you</em>’s yet, and Derek seems determined to derail Stiles's plans to say it first. With fireworks. Or bubble baths. Something epic. </p><p>The point is, Derek barely even seems to realize he's doing it, and it's driving Stiles crazy.</p><p>Or: My first time writing a 5 + 1 fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bricks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mikkimouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikkimouse/gifts).



> Despite being an avid Sterek fan and reader for years, this is my first fic. I blame it on the fact that Tyler Hoechlin calls his fans “love” in a ridiculously soft, casual way that makes me want to pull out my hair and listen to him on repeat. I also dedicate this to mikkimouse, who periodically tricks me into not-ficcing at her on twitter. (Or just patiently listens while I ramble about these beautiful men.)
> 
> Unbeta’d and written in a flurry of frustrated inspiration, so do let me know if there’s anything glaringly in need of fixing. (Or if I've missed any important tags.)
> 
> EDIT: Adding a link to [this astoundingly beautiful photoset](http://paintedrecs.tumblr.com/post/128746357040/sterekfluffer-paintedlandscape-photset-for) by sterekfluffer. I can't believe how wonderfully it captures the story's major moments.

**ONE**

The first time Derek said it, Stiles thought he’d heard wrong.

“Pass the pepper?” Derek grunted, rubbing his eyes, hair still flat on one side and sticking out in obscene tufts on the other from last night’s blowjob. Stiles pushed the grinder across the tiny, rickety table, not commenting on how it was basically at Derek’s elbow to begin with. He was too preoccupied with greedily mapping the pillow marks still creasing Derek’s usually perfect skin. 

That must have been why he imagined the soft, “Thanks, love,” before Derek ground a truly unnecessary amount of pepper over his scrambled eggs. On an ordinary day, Stiles might have been insulted by the unspoken commentary on his cooking, but he was still gaping, thoughts spinning, wishing real life had a rewind button.

Derek, presumably having heard the uptick in his heartbeat, looked up, quirking an eloquent eyebrow. He interrupted himself with a wide, teeth-baring yawn and rubbed his face tiredly again - one of Stiles’s favorite discoveries in recent memory had been that Derek was decidedly Not A Morning Person - and any further attempt at conversation was derailed by Derek swearing violently at the pepper stinging his eyes. Werewolf powers might speed up healing, but even minor injuries still hurt like a bitch in the meantime. 

Stiles might have laughed harder if he didn’t have the phantom scent of fiery hot sauce lingering in his nostrils, from having accidentally snorted it during dinner three nights earlier. (Don’t ask. Seriously, Scott, shut up, it’s easier to do than you’d think.) Derek had panicked initially, then huffed a heavy sigh and pushed his hand up under the sleeve of Stiles’s shirt, pulling the pain away from him in inky black threads. All Stiles could do, in turn, was swallow his amusement and jump to his feet, tripping over the legs of his chair and into the sink behind him. Derek let him swipe a cool cloth across his face for a few moments, until Stiles got visibly distracted tracing his sharp cheekbones and watching the water droplets trail down his beard, clinging to his chin before disappearing into the soft curls of his chest hair. 

“Stiles,” Derek sighed then (he sighed a lot around Stiles, but Stiles figured it was mostly with fondness and a heavy undercurrent of affection), tugging the cloth out of his hands and tossing it on the table.

“That’s the fourth time this month you’ve done that,” Stiles reminded him, lips quirking to the side in an instinctive grin. “You’ve been barely getting any sleep with your late shifts. You’re supposed to let me handle the cooking for right now.”

Derek opened his mouth - probably to say something truly offensive about the state of the soggy eggs on his plate - and Stiles interrupted him by dropping easily into his lap and brushing their lips together. Derek’s hands automatically rose to grip at his hips, and breakfast was delayed another thirty minutes. Or, Stiles thought, pulling back from Derek’s lips long enough to suck kisses along his jawline and down his throat, maybe forty-five minutes. He had an hour before he had to leave for the office, and a few backup cinnamon-raisin bagels hidden in one of the cabinets.

 

**TWO**

The next time, it was unmistakeable. Stiles was in the kitchen again, scraping at lumpy pancake batter with a half-melted spatula and staring into space, thinking through the lines of code he’d been trying to debug before Derek came home, peeling off his gunbelt and dragging Stiles to bed. He’d probably only slept for five or so hours, but with college only two years behind him, and nogitsune-fueled nightmares still cropping up now and again, he was used to running on far less. 

Derek was the one he worried about, lately. Derek, who was toiling up through the ranks of the sheriff’s station, accepting the worst shifts and never complaining when he got pulled away from writing up a report to go on a coffee run. Or, more often than he admitted, to finish someone else’s report. 

His dad, who frowned in disappointment whenever Derek couldn't make it to dinner, and who had taken to clapping him on the shoulder and calling him "son" (which never failed to make Derek gruffly clear his throat, his ears tinting pink in pleasure), nevertheless looked the other way at work.

"I can't give him preferential treatment, kiddo," he'd said apologetically the one time Stiles slammed into the house to rant about the dark circles under Derek's eyes. Stiles thumped grumpily around his old bedroom for a while to make a point - under pretense of finally packing up his things like his dad had been asking him to do for months - but had to admit it was fair. No one was actually treating Derek badly. This was how initiation went for all new recruits. 

In fact, when Derek did bring up how Parrish shuffled the calls from the town eccentrics over to him, Stiles got the idea that it made him feel welcomed. Like he belonged. Derek didn’t really talk about that aspect, but the wider his social network got, the more he settled into his skin. Stiles would never try to take that away from him, even if he not-so-secretly thought Derek was letting people take advantage of him. He had some ideas budding, though, on how to get revenge on the worst offenders, in a way that wouldn’t swing blame back on Derek’s head.

He jabbed at the pan, flipping the pancake with a wet splat. It was easier, he’d decided, to just make one giant pancake at a time. They tasted the same as Derek’s perfectly golden, carefully measured creations. Or, well, they did once they were soaked in enough syrup. He eyed the bag of chocolate chips sitting on the counter, debating whether to pull the blueberries out of the freezer so Derek could pretend he didn’t have a massive sweet tooth. Before he’d made up his mind, a pair of arms wrapped around his waist, and a firm body settled along his back.

“Mornin’, love,” Derek breathed directly into his ear, sending a shiver from Stiles’s scalp to his toes.

He froze in place for a split second. There was no other feasible interpretation for the words this time, although his brain skittered madly along the possibilities anyway. He laughed - shortly, awkwardly - and dropped the spatula so he could slap at Derek’s arm. “You asshole. How many times have I told you not to sneak up on me like that? One second earlier, and you would’ve made me drop this all over the stove.”

“Oh no,” Derek replied dryly, his voice still rough with sleep. “It would’ve looked so different from what normally ends up on our plates.”

Stiles, having loosely wrapped his fingers around Derek’s wrist after the first half-hearted slap, used it as leverage to twist around to more effectively growl in his face. His ass bumped against the stove, and he hissed sharply as the spatula handle jabbed him in the back and clattered to the floor, dribbling batter in its wake.

Derek drew him away from the stove, slotting their hips together and looking down into Stiles’s face with a soft smile. Stiles automatically reached up to trace the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, not yet used to the fact that his superhuman, perpetually grumpy boyfriend was developing laugh lines. “Careful, love, the burner’s still on,” Derek said. 

“It’s hot as hell in here, isn’t it,” Stiles said, waggling his eyebrows. “Maybe we should do something about that.”

Come to think of it, maybe this had been happening for a while. There were just so many other things to think about, he mused, as Derek caught his ear between sharp teeth and reached over to click off the burner.

 

**THREE**

"He keeps saying it!" he wailed, punching at the controller buttons with a little more strength than strictly necessary. "All the fucking time, like he doesn't even notice he's doing it. He said it in front of my dad, yesterday. My _dad_ , Scott."

"Well," Scott began in that reasonable tone of voice that he knew by now just made Stiles dig in his heels. 

Stiles, not particularly wanting to listen to his best friend's calming advice, ducked around a corner and shot Scott's character directly in the face. "Fuck yeah, take that, werewolf reflexes," he crowed, pumping a victorious fist in the air.

Scott winced, both at the headshot and Stiles's increasing volume, and tried again. "What did he say, exactly? And did your dad notice?"

"No." Stiles paused the game, flung the controller down, and scrubbed both hands violently through his hair until he looked like an electrocuted hedgehog. “That's what makes it so frustrating. He just said, 'Let me take that, love,' when I was carrying my last box of books out to the Jeep. Like he was saying my name or something. And my dad acted like it was totally normal! Just waved his beer at him and asked him to check out the gutters the next time he came over."

"Your dad gets so much free work out of him."

Stiles snorted. "He's still trying so hard to impress him. I don't think he knows my dad threatened to arrest Old Mrs. Welks for saying something shitty about Derek's family last week."

Scott just looked at him, and Stiles gave a full body eyeroll and amended his story.

"Okay, yeah, that would be a total abuse of power, and my dad would never. But she insinuated something awful about Laura's murder and then scuttled right out of the store when my dad started talking about unpaid parking tickets and enforcing elder eye exams. The point is, he loves Derek. Not as much as I do, obviously, but I think he'd cry just as hard if we ever broke up."

"So you love Derek."

"Obviously."

"And Derek loves you."

"Yeah."

"Then I don't get what the problem is. Why are you upset he keeps saying it?"

Stiles let out all of his breath, collapsing backwards into the couch. "Because he hasn't actually said it. Not in so many words. It's like this weird pet name, and I don't even know when it started. I think he's been doing it for months, and I didn't realize what he was saying until recently. I'm a shitty boyfriend." 

Scott made a noise of angry disagreement, prepared to jump to his friend's defense, but Stiles shook his hand at him impatiently.

"You're not getting it, Scotty. That's not the worst part."

Scott remained silent and raised his eyebrows, having learned more than a few tricks from Derek over the years.

Stiles melted even farther into the cushions, which Scott hadn't thought was possible. He looked like a jellyfish now, limp and boneless. Like a jellyfish puddled in plaid and khaki. He held back a snicker, trying to keep his attention focused on Stiles’s problems instead of looking longingly at the screen, with its flickering temptation at the corner of his vision.

“I was supposed to say it _first_ ,” Stiles finally moaned. “I had A Plan. There were going to be fireworks. Or bubble baths. Something major, I hadn’t figured it out quite yet, but it was going to be epic.”

Scott sorted through a variety of responses before settling on, “I can’t believe you haven’t said it yet. You’ve been together for years. You basically moved in with him when you started your new job.”

“I know, but.” Stiles picked at an edge of the cushion, ripping out threads that Scott was pretty sure weren’t supposed to come loose. “Neither of us ever said it. I don’t know why, really. I think we were both kind of nervous, when it started, like...like saying something would make it too real, and someone would come along and try to take it away from us.”

He lapsed into a brief silence, and Scott mentally filled in the blanks. The way Lydia still touched her throat, sometimes, and never wore necklaces. The reason Allison thumbed at the scar on her chest, or had to stop to gulp air into her straining lungs midway through a run. Or how Stiles was tapping his fingers along the couch right now, one by one, a tic that had never quite gone away.

“And after a while,” Stiles added slowly, “it was kind of our thing? We say pretty much everything else, and I don’t need to hear it to know we’re okay. But it’s...meaningful to me, I dunno. I wanted to say it, and I wanted it to be special.”

“You still can,” Scott said, packing as much encouragement as possible into the words. “He hasn’t beaten you to it yet. Maybe you just need to speed up your plan?”

“Yeah. Yeah!” The spark started to light up Stiles’s eyes again, and he bounced to his feet. “When you’re right, Scotty, you’re right. I’m going to rummage through your stuff from work. What do you have? Stethoscopes? Thermometers?”

Scott looked mournfully at the tv but trailed after Stiles as he bounded up the stairs. “I don’t want to know what you and Derek are into,” he called after him, “but I’m really not sure my spare scrubs scream ‘Big Romantic Gesture’.”

 

**FOUR**

It had been weeks. Weeks of frantic preparations, aborted plans, and Stiles trying his best to not tear out his hair. He’d thought about the fireworks: really, seriously thought about them, even mapping out the best method of raiding the confiscated stash in the evidence room, since it was out of season and that was the only way he could think of to get his hands on enough for the kind of display he wanted. Belatedly, he'd realized that a giant burst of fiery explosions probably wasn’t the best thing to spring on Derek. 

He still forgot, sometimes. Derek wasn’t afraid of much, and he sturdily pushed his way past the few fears that did weigh on him, as though facing them head on was the only way to strip away their power. It was one of the things that had made Stiles start to fall in love with him, to begin with. The way his eyes widened, bare emotions splashed all over his face, before he collected himself and dove into the worst of the fray. The way he gritted his teeth and rolled his shoulders and prepared to die for people who’d never do the same in turn. It was also one of the few things that Stiles hated about him, and the source of most of their fights.

“You don’t care about yourself!” he’d roared at Derek, in the last battle before they’d leashed the Nemeton’s power. “You’re trying to die! You act like it wouldn’t kill everyone else around you if you did.”

Derek had stared at him, his clawed hands - soaked in his own blood - still holding torn sections of his flesh as they knitted back together. He’d said nothing, but Stiles had felt as though he’d been struck in the chest: how long had it been since he’d been able to read Derek’s expressions? Since he knew, from the curve of his eyebrows, the whirlpool of emotions in his eyes, and the way his lips just barely parted, exactly what Derek was thinking? 

Stiles had kicked furiously at the dirt, sending a rock ricocheting off a nearby tree, and twisted his wrist, pulling the spare mountain ash back from the ground and into the pouch attached to his belt. Before he’d stalked away, he’d flung one final volley at the man sprawled on the ground. “If this is what you came back for, I wish you’d stayed away. You deserve more than dying for us.”

Things hadn’t come together neatly after that incident, but it had been the turning point - for Stiles, at least. He’d suspected Derek had other reasons for returning, a half-formed assumption that had been confirmed through whispered words later on, as Derek gasped, open-mouthed and wanting, into his skin.

Joining the sheriff’s department turned out to be their best compromise. It gave Derek an opportunity to protect the town, the way the Hales had done for generations, with the support of the entire force at his back. Stiles never fully relaxed, not anymore, but something in his chest loosened when he thought of Derek watching out for his dad, and his dad keeping an eye on him. Derek would take a bullet for the Sheriff without flinching, but his dad - and the deputies who teased him but treated him like a brother - would be there to make sure he didn’t have to.

Stiles crunched his latest set of plans - which merely said “rent an elephant???” - into a ball and lobbed it at the trashcan. That was the problem. There was no gesture big enough to encompass what Derek’s love meant to him. He wanted to pull down the damn moon and hand it to him on a silver platter. 

He pushed himself out of his desk chair, retrieved the paper from its spot two feet to the left of the trashcan, and tossed it in before accepting that his creativity was drained for the day. He’d try again later.

As he stretched, fists braced in the small of his back, tight muscles popping from the day’s inactivity, his gaze caught on the laundry bin in the corner. It was his turn, probably. Technically, it had probably been his turn for the last month, but Derek’s much more sensitive nose meant that he tended to take care of those chores - laundry, dishes, trash - while Stiles was still wrapped up in his work. He didn’t usually feel all that guilty about it, to be honest, but it’d be a small gesture, at least, while he plotted the life-changing one.

An hour later, he was dumping a clean, dry load into a basket on top of the washer and conducting a cursory sniff test on the shirt he was wearing to decide whether to toss it in with the next cycle. He perked up when he heard the front door open, knowing it wouldn’t take Derek long to find him. Sure enough, Derek slipped into the laundry room after only a few minutes, efficiently stripped down to a white tank top and his uniform pants.

“Hey,” he said, leaning over to kiss Stiles in greeting, then drawing back to prop himself against the still-warm dryer. He looked a little tired, but happy, and tasted like the station’s bitter coffee, sweetened by far too many packets of smuggled-in sugar. “How was your day?”

The tense lines around Stiles’s mouth softened. “Better now,” he said, feeling stupidly sappy even as the words escaped, but grateful for the way it made the corners of Derek’s lips tilt upward. “Had a frustrating problem I was trying to untangle.” 

“Which is why you’re finally doing laundry,” Derek said, tilting an eyebrow at the pile Stiles was still sorting through.

He barked out an abrupt laugh. “Yeah, yeah. You got me. I was having trouble concentrating, and you know I sometimes need to shift gears before I can get back on track.”

“I know,” Derek said. “You’ll get it, though. You always do.”

Stiles looked at Derek - really looked at him. Took in the length of his body as he lounged across the room - still impossibly muscular, but leaner than he’d been in the early years, when he’d spent every spare moment building up the stamina to fight against his demons. The way his limbs were relaxed, his arms resting loosely at his sides, rather than braced tightly across his chest to shield him from the world. The vulnerable curl of his bare toes against the cold linoleum. He pulled his gaze back up to Derek’s eyes - on the greener side of the spectrum today, projecting a calm, peaceful contentment - and blurted out, “I love you.”

Derek blinked at him. His lips twitched, and he said, “I know, love.”

Stiles felt his mouth hanging open and snapped it shut after a few too-long moments. He felt off-balance. Breathless, as though he’d stepped off a precipice and found solid ground waiting for him, his legs still shuddering from the unexpected impact. “But - Derek. That was the first time I’ve ever said it. We never say that to each other.”

“That’s not true,” Derek said slowly, his forehead scrunching in honest confusion. “I tell you every day.”

It wasn’t often that Stiles felt completely at a loss for words. Maybe that was the big moment he’d been looking for, the thing that would set this premature implosion of his grand plans apart from every other day. Because that was it, wasn’t it. Derek did tell him - every day, through his words and his actions - and Stiles had been holding back out of some misplaced fear of not finding the right pattern, of not having a final piece to click into place.

“But I’ve never said it before,” he repeated. “I had - I had all these plans. And I did it while holding your dirty underwear.” He looked down at the dark blue boxer briefs he was twisting in his hands, and held them out to Derek.

Derek laughed - a bright, joyous burst of sound that happened far more often in recent years, but which Stiles never tired of hearing. He moved forward, plucking the underwear out of Stiles’s fingers and dropping them back into the pile, crowding him against the washer. 

Stiles’s lips parted, and he looked at Derek’s mouth, expecting it to crash into his, one of their many magnetic points of contact. Instead, Derek leaned in, bumping their noses together, nuzzling at him affectionately before pulling away.

“Wha-” Stiles said, narrowing his eyes and frowning, reaching out to grab him back.

A rarely-seen dimple popped into Derek’s cheek, and he crossed to the doorway. “You want to make this memorable, right?”

“Yeah?” he said, still a few steps behind, something that only ever seemed to happen around Derek. It was another of the reasons he loved him - and one of the things he was beginning to think he needed to start telling him when he thought of it, rather than filing it away as part of a major unveiling years down the line.

Derek raised his hand, a soft pink, lacy scrap of fabric dangling from his fingers. “I’m pretty sure these weren’t supposed to go through the dryer. But want to check to see if they still fit?”

Stiles grinned, suddenly more than fully on board, new ideas spinning into concrete plans that his fingers itched to test out. “Hell yeah,” he breathed. “Fuck, I love you.”

 

**FIVE**

Stiles moodily poked at the department store’s bargain bin, setting off a chain of fluffy bears moaning digital endearments. He yelped when sharp nails dug into his bicep but followed obediently, dragging his feet to the perfume section, where Lydia released his arm to rejoin Allison in spraying scraps of paper and sniffing delicately at them. He flopped onto the glass counter and flicked at the stack of scent-papers in front of him.

“I don’t see how this counts as Christmas shopping. I’m pretty sure Scott doesn’t want a bottle of perfume.”

Allison merely glanced at him before waving another bit of paper under her nose, then sticking it under Lydia’s, who breathed in and nodded in approval.

“The _bottle_ is not for Scott,” Lydia told him, already bored with the conversation. “The person who will be wearing the contents, decked out in new lingerie, is.”

“Lingerie, I get,” he said, straightening up and knocking a display with his elbow. He reached out to adjust it, glaring at the salesperson who seemed poised to dart in their direction and offer assistance. “But Scott’s a werewolf. He’s got, you know, that heightened sense of smell. This seems like a terrible idea.”

“You may be dating a werewolf,” Allison said, capping off the display bottle and waving over the salesperson Stiles had just effectively disposed of, “but one, not everyone is the same, which you should know more than anyone, and two, you’ve obviously got some tricks of the bedroom left to learn.” She dimpled at him, and Stiles grinned back, ducking his head and rubbing awkwardly at the back of his hair.

It had taken years to get their friendship back on track; Allison knew full well that she hadn’t been stabbed by Stiles, or anyone under his orders, but what both of them understood on a cognitive level didn’t always carry through to the dark threads twining about their hearts. Even Lydia got a distant look in her eyes sometimes, and in the immediate aftermath, she’d flinched away from him on more than one occasion, her muscle memory still tied to the dark spirit who’d used Stiles’s body to terrorize all of them.

It was another area where Stiles clung to Derek. There were the nightmares, of course - less and less frequent, but still present - when he woke with a thudding heart and the echoes of screams burning his throat, with Derek stroking his hair from his forehead and reminding him who he was and where he belonged. It happened, too, though, in the broad daylight. Something as innocuous as a shaft of light at just the right angle could catch Stiles off-guard, setting off some distant sense memory that made him grasp for Derek’s hand and press their fingertips together.

He never needed to say anything. Derek would tap his fingers, each in turn, against his, then slot their fingers together and hold his hand until he grew restless and pushed the darkness aside. Derek had told him, about a year into their relationship, about the dream Kate’s return had thrown him into, his mind briefly unhinging from reality at the shock.

“That’s when I realized how much I trusted you,” he’d said, tracing his fingertips down the palm of Stiles’s hand, sketching swirling patterns along his wrist. “I knew you were the one person I could go to. Even if you didn’t like me, you’d still tell me the truth.”

“I always liked you,” Stiles had argued, pulling Derek’s hand to his chest when he tried to shake his head in disagreement. “No, listen. I didn’t always understand you, and let’s be honest - you were kind of a big fucking creep for a while there, stalking Scott and biting people and being generally shifty. But I always knew, deep down, that you weren’t one of the bad ones. And you know how good my people-instincts are. You made me nervous, for a while, but I was never actually afraid of you.”

“You’re never afraid of a lot of things that would scare the shit out of normal people,” Derek had said, rolling his eyes but not debating the validity of Stiles’s impeccable intuition. 

“That’s why you l-lean on me,” he’d countered, stumbling over the word he wasn’t ready to say yet, but recovering gracefully. “Because neither of us is interested in being normal, whatever that means.”

“I do,” Derek had replied, his eyes tracking over Stiles’s face in a way that gave him a light-headed, heart-pumping exhilaration that reminded him of the first time he’d locked eyes with that intense gaze, young and stupid and brave in the front seat of a police cruiser. “You’re my anchor, Stiles. Maybe for longer than that, but that’s when I knew for sure.”

Humans didn’t have anchors, Stiles knew, but there’d been this clenching emptiness in his chest ever since the nogitsune was wrenched out of him. It filled, at least in part, when he bugged his dad about his health or crowded in on his case files, when he played video games and shot the shit with Scott, when Lydia dragged him out with her and bounced her romantic escapades or mathematical theorems off him, when he and Allison let down their walls enough to catch a movie together and share an oversized popcorn bucket. But it was Derek who made him forget to be afraid of himself.

He’d seen everything the nogitsune had, trapped in his own head, not in control of his body or his words. Flickering between himself and the void, he’d sometimes lost track of the difference, spiraling into a pit of self-loathing, unsure who it was who’d betrayed Scott, or sent the bomb to his dad’s office. No one else could tell when they looked at him, and he’d wanted to claw his face when he stared in the mirror, wanted to leave some mark that would tell him what was real and when he’d lost control. But when Derek looked at him, he saw him. When the nogitsune flung Derek against the wall of his loft, Derek had looked through it, into Stiles’s eyes. He’d seen him, through the darkness. He’d known he was still worth saving.

When Stiles had finally worked up the courage to tell Derek how much that had meant to him, and how it was one of the few things that had kept him fighting long after everything seemed hopeless, he’d looked away for a long stretch, shadows drawing over his sharp features.

“Do you remember the pool?” he’d asked finally. 

“Yeah. Which part? The part with Jackson being even more of a snake than usual, or the part where you claimed I was enough of a selfish asshole to only keep your head above water so you could fight him for me?”

Derek’s lips had curved upwards in response, but he’d brushed it off, saving the rest of that argument for another time. “After, when we knew what he was. When I described him to you, and you looked right in my eyes and told me that he was an abomination.”

Stiles had nodded impatiently at him, gesturing for him to go on.

“You said that like it was something different. Like he’d been twisted, like he’d gone wrong. I - Stiles, it was the first time I can remember where someone looked right at me and used that word and didn’t mean me.”

Stiles’s throat clicked as he swallowed, remembering the warmth that had wrapped over that hole in his chest at Derek’s cracked-open expression, and he brushed his hands roughly over his eyes, following his friends to the next section of the store. 

“One more stop,” he warned them, “and then it’s my turn. You’re both lucky your presents are already wrapped and under the tree, or I’d be rethinking your gifts right about now. I still need to track down Derek’s _and_ Scott’s.”

Lydia waved at him dismissively, reaching over to run her elegant fingers over the silky two-piece Allison had paused to consider. “You know perfectly well you could stick a brick in a box and make both of them blissfully happy just because it came from you.”

“That is completely irrelevant,” he argued, pulling himself to his full height and angling into her line of vision to better make his point. “Gifts are a physical manifestation of what people mean to you. It’s important! Plus, it’s not just Christmas, it’s Derek’s birthday. That means _two_ major presents for him, distinct enough so neither one seems like an afterthought. It sucks to have your holidays squashed into one, and I’m not letting it happen.”

“What did Derek give you for Christmas last year?” Lydia asked, pulling another item off a rack and draping it over Allison’s growing dressing room pile.

Stiles squinted. “A...book? I think? He usually buys me books, the giant nerd.”

“And what did you give him?”

“Oh man, that was a good one. Christmas - a new tv stand, with glass doors to keep all his DVDs nice, because he insists on buying actual copies instead of just downloading them to his computer. I even put it together before wrapping it.”

“Which is why it wobbles, just like your kitchen table,” Allison volunteered, meeting his glare with a grin.

“And for his birthday, the full box set of that History Channel show he was obsessed with. He loved them. Of course, I had to watch the damn thing for weeks, but it was totally worth it for the look on his face when he opened it.” He beamed at the memory. 

“And he gave you a book. Which you don’t remember the title of.”

“Well, yeah. I don’t know what you’re saying? I’m sure it was a good book. That’s his thing, he’s got great taste.”

“What I’m saying,” Lydia continued patiently, “is that when I picked Allison up from Scott’s, Derek was there, and he looked like he was five seconds away from shaving off all his hair to knit you a sweater with it.”

“Gross,” he shuddered. “And sad. He’d obviously still be hot, but I can’t imagine him bald.”

“You’re not this dense, Stiles. You know what I meant. He has no idea what to give you, and you always go completely overboard with presents. You broke the money limit every year we tried to institute it.”

“But - I don’t care about that,” he said, genuinely baffled. “He could give _me_ a brick in a box, and I’d frame that fucker. I’d use it as a paperweight for the rest of my life. He could give me _half_ a brick.”

“Have you told him that?”

“Well...no. I guess not.” He absently fingered a pair of bright red panties, flipping the tag over to check the price. “I don’t give him things because I want something back. That’d be some sort of unsustainable competition. I just love finding things that make him happy.”

Allison shifted the burden in her arms, catching a negligee before it fell to the ground. “Okay, this’ll do for a first round. I’m going to try these on. Lydia, you come with me. Stiles, maybe think about talking this through with Derek? Ripping out his hair is an exaggeration, but he did seem more anxious than usual.”

Stiles chewed on the inside of his cheek as she swept away. He patted at his pockets after a few minutes, pulling out his phone and considering it. He and Derek usually tried to not interrupt each other when they were having friend-time - Stiles’s rule, after Kira had caught Derek checking his phone for the fiftieth time the morning after Stiles had sweated his way through a particularly bad panic attack - but he didn’t want him to waste his entire day chasing a phantom perfect gift around town.

He hit speed dial and lifted his phone to his ear, making his way out of the building.

“Hey,” Derek said after the second ring. “What’s wrong?”

“This is the bad part of our rule,” Stiles informed him. “We’re going to freak each other out any time we actually do break it to call.” 

He huffed at him in relief. “If it’s not urgent, I am kind of busy right now.”

“Trying to buy me a Christmas present, I know.”

There was silence on the other end. Then, a resigned, “Lydia.”

“She told me you’ve been freaking yourself out, babe. What’s going on? You know I’ll love whatever you give me.”

“I’m not _freaked out_ ,” he said grumpily. “I was just asking Scott for advice. He’s known you for longer than anyone but your dad, and your dad gives the world’s worst presents.”

Stiles snorted with laughter. “The mini fondue set he ordered for us the first year we were dating. Which he didn’t realize came in a tiny novelty box and only fit one strawberry at a time.”

“Still better than the twin-sized velour Batman sheets he gave you for your birthday. Last year.”

“Hey! Those sheets were fucking awesome! Or, they would have been, if they weren’t clearly made for children. And two sizes too small for our bed. His _ideas_ are on the right track - he just completely fails at reading the fine print.”

“I’d say he’s still in denial about where you sleep, but even your old bed’s a double.”

That brought Stiles back on track, and he pulled his phone away from his ear to point accusingly at it, as though Derek could see him. “You’re trying to distract me, and it almost worked. First of all, my dad has been gratefully shoving me and all of my junk at you since long before we were ready to live together. He got used to his personal space while I was at school. And, back to what we’re supposed to be discussing - do we need to go back to the spending limits? I can try to stick to it this year.”

“ _Stiles_ ,” and that was his exasperated tone of voice. “No. You’d never manage it, anyway.” 

He waited for more, then rolled his eyes and tried again. Derek was far more of a conversationalist than he would’ve expected when they were first getting to know each other - able to out-talk Stiles on a surprising number of topics - but it was still harder to drag things out of him over the phone, when he couldn’t read the nuances of his expressions.

“Does it bother you, though? My gift-giving style?”

“No! No, not at all. This is why I didn’t want to have this conversation. You-” He paused, recollecting his thoughts, and started over. “Stiles, you give amazing gifts. You spend way more time and money than you should, and it makes all of us feel happy - because it makes _you_ happy. I don’t feel like it’s a competition, if that’s what you’re worrying about.” 

“That’s exactly what I said! I’m a Big Gesture kind of guy, you know that.”

“I do,” Derek said, clearly attempting - and failing - to sound anything but fond about it. 

“But that doesn’t mean I need you to be a Big Gesture kind of guy, too. Actually, it’s better for me if you’re not. I don’t want you stealing my thunder, babe. Holidays are my thing.”

Derek chuckled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“So we’re agreed? You’ll stop wandering all over town trying to find something special for me? You’ll just get me the first thing you thought of? You know, like usual?”

Another pause. “That doesn’t exactly make me feel better about the quality of my gift-giving,” he said pointedly.

“Hey! Hey now, you know what I meant. I love your presents. I love presents in general. But Derek - I love you. That’s why I spend forever figuring out exactly what to get you. It’s how I show you how much I care about you. It doesn’t mean it’s the _best_ way. It’s just - mine.”

“I know,” he said. “And it does. You go ridiculously above and beyond what you should, but it makes me feel special.” His voice had gone a little gruff with embarrassment, which was a clear sign that they’d strayed into Uncomfortably Emotional Territory. As free as he’d gotten with his affection over the years, Derek still got bristly when the focus shifted to him and had to be soothed into accepting that he deserved it. It worked out just fine for them, since Stiles had never backed down from a challenge in his life.

“That’s all I want,” he said softly. “And the thing is, maybe it is a little bit of a competition. But I’m behind. I’m so far behind, because you show me every single day. I don’t need you to give me anything. I know it because of the way you treat me. Because of the way you look at me, every damn day. I know.”

Derek knew better than to turn this one into a debate, and they simply listened to each other breathing for a bit, Stiles’s smile pulling at his cheeks until he knew he was grinning at his phone like an idiot. It buzzed then, breaking the moment, and he glanced at it and grimaced.

“Hey, it’s Lydia - I’ve gotta go. I deserted them in a pile of lace and satin. I’ll talk to you later, okay? Tell Scott to stop giving you terrible advice, and go to the batting cages like you wanted.”

“See you tonight, love.”

Stiles slid his phone back into his pocket after running a quick search and checking the time. If he could drag Lydia and Allison away from the mall, he’d still have time for an important stop. He’d changed his mind about Derek’s present this year.

 

**+ONE**

“Ow! Ow. Oh my god, ow. Fuck fuck fuck ow oh hell.”

“Stiles,” Allison sighed from next to him. “They haven’t even started yet. They _can’t_ start until you tell them what design you want.”

He slitted one eye open, then slammed it shut again and moaned. “I can’t do this. I can hear the needles. This is so much worse than when Scott got it done. Actually,” he said, cheering up a little and opening both eyes, “maybe we should go somewhere else? His is a piece of crap anyway - literally anyone can tattoo two lines.”

“I like his tattoo,” Allison said loyally, although Stiles was convinced she didn’t sound too sure about it.

“You have to say that, because he did it to remember you. It was a fucking romantic gesture. Oh god. I have to do this, don’t I.”

“Bricks,” Lydia said from across the room, where she was flipping through a book of designs.

Allison squeezed his hand. “It’s a great idea, but you don’t have to go through with it. You definitely don’t have to do it today.”

“No, I have to,” he groaned, holding his head and willing the room to stop spinning. “If I don’t do it now, I’ll never make it back through the doors. You’re going to have to tie me down or something. Or I’ll just - oh god, I’ll just pass out on the table. They can still tattoo me when I’m unconscious, right? That’ll make it hurt less, so it’ll be good.”

Allison glanced at the tattoo artist sitting behind the counter, who was giving them both an epically judgmental expression that Stiles would have taken as a personal challenge if he hadn’t been rocking in place in his chair. She nudged him with a warning elbow. “If you want them to agree to take you, you’re going to have to calm down a little more. You’re already lucky that they have an opening this afternoon.”

“Scott didn’t make an appointment,” he countered, trying to breathe more deeply and ignore the sparkles creeping into the edges of his vision. “I think they always have openings. Like I said: not the most in-demand place. Kind of dodgy, too. They didn’t even question his fake ID.”

“Are you sure this is where you want to get it done, then? There have to be other options.”

“Yeah, but the good ones are booked months in advance. No, I can do this. The triskele’s an easy design. I’ve already got it pulled up on my phone.” He waved it at her, then leaned over and breathed into his knees. “I can totally do this.”

Allison patted his back, then stood up, probably to go talk to Lydia about how they should steal Stiles’s spot in line by getting matching friendship tattoos. She settled back into the chair after a minute, but when her hand rested on his back again, it was considerably wider and heavier than before. It also trailed up into his hair, cupping his neck gently, which would be an incredibly weird thing for his best friend’s fiancee to do.

He turned his head slightly to the side to confirm what he already knew.

“Derek, what the fuck. Who called you?”

“They both texted me,” he said, rubbing the sensitive area behind his ear with a broad thumb. “Said you were passing out in a tattoo parlor and that I needed to come rescue you.”

“That is so far from accurate, I don’t even have the energy right now to talk about it. I was thinking. About the design. Planning how to describe it so the artist wouldn’t screw it up.”

“Mhm,” he agreed, swirling his thumb in a familiarly soothing pattern. “You want to get out of here?”

“You don’t even know how much, yes.” 

Stiles wasn’t surprised that when he stood up, both women were nowhere in sight. “They’d better be off buying me a fucking fantastic present,” he muttered, shoving his phone in his pocket and tugging the sleeves of his overshirt back down.

Derek eyed the movement curiously, but didn’t ask until they’d left the shop and walked to Derek’s car. He only broke the silence after Stiles had tugged the door open, slammed it behind him, and clicked his seatbelt closed.

“You hate tattoos.”

“I don’t _hate_ tattoos.”

“You hate needles. And you’ve never wanted a tattoo before.”

Stiles didn’t reply, picking instead at a stain on the dash he was pretty sure he’d put there with a triple shot vanilla latte while recovering from a particularly difficult work project. 

Derek didn’t push, driving in silence until they reached the entrance to the Preserve. He pulled off the road then, parking neatly and getting out of the car. Stiles waited until he’d reached the treeline before moving. It didn’t take long to catch up, which meant Derek had slowed as soon as he’d heard the car door shut. They followed the path that Stiles knew led to their favorite overlook of the city, and he felt the tension fading, bit by bit, as the hush of the woods settled over them. Since that final Nemeton battle, when the beacon stopped calling supernatural creatures to it, the woods had returned to the welcoming quiet he’d remembered from his childhood, only the occasional rustling of a bird or squirrel breaking the stillness. He breathed it in, letting the peace filter through his lungs.

“I’m pissed at them for meddling,” he said after a while.

“They didn’t tell me what you were trying to do,” Derek said, looking sideways at him but not breaking stride. “You don’t have to tell me, either.”

He stumbled slightly over a tree root, then kicked at a rock in retaliation. “It was going to be your Christmas present. I’m pissed at myself for not being able to do it.”

“Why would my present be a tattoo on your body?” he asked, halting to turn to him fully, his brow furrowing. 

“It was going to match yours. Not on my back - I knew I wouldn’t be able to sit still long enough for one that big. I wanted - I wanted to do something to link us, so you’d know. This is it for me. This is permanent.”

“ _Stiles_ ,” he said, and this time there were a thousand meanings in his tone. “I tell you that your presents are unnecessarily elaborate, and you take that to mean that you have to do something even bigger?”

“Not have to,” he corrected. “Want to.”

“Well, I don’t want you to,” he said, reaching out to cup the side of Stiles’s face. “Not if that’s something you’re only doing because you think it’d be meaningful to me. My tattoo - it’s important to me. But I got it to burn my memories into my skin. You and I - we don’t need that. We already have each other. We don’t need the pain as a reminder of what we’ve lost.”

Stiles leaned into the familiar gesture, encouraging him to trace his thumb along his cheekbone. The corners of Derek’s eyes crinkled, and the lines in his forehead smoothed out.

“I love you,” he said. “I trust you. It’s all I’ve ever needed.”

“Of course you would, you fucking thunder stealer,” Stiles grumbled, and Derek lifted his eyebrows in question. “Here I was, falling all over myself to say it the right way for the first time, and you break out those three words in the most fucking romantic way possible. I love you too, you asshole.”

Derek dropped his hand to Stiles’s waist and brushed his lips across the bridge of his nose and down his cheek, pausing at the corner of his mouth. “Can I ask you for one thing, then?”

“Yeah, of course,” he said, turning to catch his lips.

Derek pulled back after a series of kisses that went on for longer than Stiles suspected he’d meant them to. “Will you stop buying things for me? Or, if you still want to do that part, alternate it with gifts for us? I’d rather spend time with you. So anything that goes towards that - that’s good with me.”

“I can do that. First, we’re going to our lookout rock, and I’m taking you apart with my mouth. Then, we’re going home, and I’m going to buy us plane tickets to Ireland. Or Germany, or any place overseas. We can wander around their old castles or whatever it is you’re into.”

“And we’ll find all the local pubs and pick fights with people when you stumble across some supernatural nest and accidentally insult their leader.”

“You know me so well.”

“I try. I think it’s going to take a lot more years to get it right, though.”

What Stiles didn’t tell Derek was that the trip only counted as his Christmas present. For his birthday, he mail-ordered a packet of custom temporary tattoos, which he planned to wear on special occasions, or periodically apply to the section of his wrist where Derek always traced the triskele when bringing him out of a nightmare.

Naturally, the first batch was more cheaply made than he’d expected, and Derek hovered over him in dismay, trying to pull the non-existent pain from the rash before insisting he go to the doctor. 

Stiles went along with it, making faces at Melissa McCall over Derek’s shoulder as she dabbed ointment on his wrist, and agreeably tossing the tattoos in the trash. It was fine. He’d just try again. He had all the time in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> I've got a [fic recs blog](http://paintedrecs.tumblr.com/) and a [regular blog](http://paintedlandscape.tumblr.com/), and you're welcome to find me on either/both. I tend to ramble more on [twitter](https://twitter.com/paintedrecs).


End file.
